Learning to Hit My Mother: Stories of Calamity

For fans of Cormac McCarthy, a novel-in-stories that chronicles, with compelling accuracy and violence and through shape-shifting prose and rococo, one girl’s passage from childhood to motherhood in a small midwestern town.

A clear-eyed and necessary account of how violence insinuates itself into characters living liminal lives in the purgatorial world of Ontario, Illinois, Learning to Hit My Mother is a collection of connected stories that all possess a unity of place—and characters so compellingly human that they promise, with an almost unflappable certainty, to possess the reader.

Pit, a girl at the onset, is savaged by her mother, who goes at her with her hands, heart, and even a baseball bat because her husband—Pit’s father—has had her. This demented triangulation forms Pit. Throughout her life she is drawn to misfits—like her friend Bean, who ultimately steps in front of a train. From these inauspicious beginnings ensues a whole delectable slew of stories; stories full of meaty, fragmented souls—Lou, Edgar, Twink, Leesa, and Pit’s son, Sam; stories whose quiet intensity will capture fans of Sherwood Anderson and Clarice Lispector.

Championed by language that is jarringly precise, Learning to Hit My Mother soars in its visceral portrait of the monstrous as located in what might be called the sublimity of the ordinary. Haunting, unputdownable, and gripping, each story galvanizes with thought- provoking prose that hits each and every cell.

Elizabeth Kirschner has written across decades. Her books include My Life as a Doll, Waking the Bones, and her debut collection of stories, Because the Sky Is a Thousand Soft Hurts. Kirschner expertly crafts the unexpected in stories that leave the reader feeling haunted and moved. Her voice is poetic, lyrical, and singular. Book after book is monumental exploration of beauty in unpredictable places. She exposes the vulnerable and damaged through the lens of hope and redemption. A Master Gardener, Kirschner currently lives in Blue Hill, ME.